Posts tagged ‘twitter’
and the winner is…um…hang on…
So, we had a general election in the UK yesterday, when the public decided that they couldn’t actually agree who should run the country. Its now nearly 24 hours since the polls closed and we still don’t know who’s now in charge. My friend Liz had this to say about it on facebook:
Liz reckons someone should find half an hour and a biro to jot down a constitution…
…how many people voted yesterday – 40 million?? Ish?? And now it’s all down to 3 egomaniacs in a political love triangle, each with a hugely subjective and life-defining stake in the matter, to flirt with each other and throw dice in the air to sort it all out…?!?
From twitter, I bring you highlights of the genius that is Caitlin Moran and India Knight:
The hung parliament: Con-Dem Nation.
How is Dimbleby STILL on telly? He started at 10pm last night. They must be wrapping him in a silver blanket and giving him glucose drinks.
Am broken. How are the telly people still functioning? They can’t all be giant cokeheads.
This election’s crippling me. As everything’s uncertain, the paper really needs people who can toss on at length about sod all *types madly*.
Still awake. Can’t they settle it with a game of Fives or something?
Though I suppose it’s more like Sardines.
The weather outside (was) frightful
I’ve perhaps been guilty of overdoing the ‘oh-my-god-its-still-snowing’ posts on the blog recently (the white stuff lasted 4 ½ weeks in the end) and I can’t imagine that anyone outside the snow-bound UK would have found them particularly interesting.
But what I have found invaluable as I’ve tried to make the decision in recent weeks whether to risk the journey into work has been traffic and weather updates (complete with photos) from my friends on twitter and facebook. It’s been like a (private) public service. Ice on the A65? Traffic jams in Horsforth? Someone will kindly let me know.
pic by the lovely @LisaWisniowski
Although the local radio stations were busy collating traffic and snow news, with listeners phoning in live reports, the bit of the online world focused on the UK didn’t seem to have found a way to crowd source on the ground information in this way.
In North America, their National Weather Service has just launched a Twitter-based program to monitor tweets about severe weather (tweets are tagged #wxreport), but we don’t seem to have a UK equivalent. Time to sort it out before the next cold snap?
time to rejoin twitter
I’ve finally cracked and rejoined twitter. I was There In The Beginning (well almost, twitter officially launched in July 2006), when I signed up in Spring 2007 to join in the buzz around the first Interesting, but regular tweeting didn’t suit me so I deleted the account a few months later.
Roll round to 2009 – the world and his brand icon have twitter accounts and the only reliable way to keep track of them all seems to be via setting myself up on twitter. So here we go again, but this time I think I’m going to use it as a kind of RSS reader rather than a broadcast medium. Let’s see how long I can hold off the temptation to tweet…
Fangs for the distraction
I came across a great phrase the other day – Time Vampires. Which seems to be commonly defined as distractions or events that take you away from your working day.
So hello, Twitter. And hi there to facebook and just about every other social networking site and blogging platform. It’s very tempting when inspiration is failing to strike to click over to bloglines and see what’s new or to have a quick look at BrandRepublic.
To be fair, I regularly find blog posts via my RSS feeds that are hugely relevant to whatever I’m working on at the moment. I just have to spend a lot of time wading through baby pictures, technology reviews and bitching to get to them.
I know some people who are really virtuous and only check their RSS feeds once a day. I don’t have that kind of self control but having just moved desks to one where my laptop screen can be seen by at least twenty people at least there’s a bit more of an incentive to stay productive.
Aligned to what I see as a future move towards more discerning social networking (only using the networks that really work for you), maybe we’ll see a Second Life style growth in inactive accounts on Twitter as the world remembers that they really do have to get that report finished.
